


No Ithaca

by Blablu



Category: The Brothers Bloom (2008)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-01
Updated: 2019-09-01
Packaged: 2020-10-05 00:09:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20479727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blablu/pseuds/Blablu
Summary: He doesn't need her there and she knows it, so she makes her own exit, on her own terms : with heaps of style - and a bang.(or, what happens after Bang Bang leaves the brothers for the last time)





	No Ithaca

She knows that Stephen is dead the minute he's taken. Or, well, not dead yet but dead soon, in a few hours, few days at most. She's only realizing it now, but it's been a long time coming. Bang Bang hopes things will go his way. That he will be able to take his last bow on his terms.  
He doesn't need her there and she knows it (it stings a bit, even though it shouldn't, even though she wants no part in that anyway), so she makes her own exit, on her own terms : with heaps of style – and a bang. Two can play this game.

But she keeps the cellphone, which isn't like her. She should have already blown it to smithereens. She can't bring herself to do so and she's aware of what it means, but she doesn't want to face it. So, she doesn't. Two can play this game, indeed.

Love isn't the word she'd use. She loved him, of course, and with Stephen everything was more or less about love, but she wasn't in love with him, not at all. Fondness, really, is what it was. She was fond of him, and of his jagged shard of a brother, and of everything Penelope brought to their three-legged table. But love isn't the word.  
They had tried to have sex exactly once and it had been a disaster. She should have expected it, because Stephen was generally terrible at anything he didn't do for his little brother or for some kind of long con, but still. What a spectacularly bad lay. They had stopped in the middle of it – both of them agreeing that this wasn't working – and Stephen had made them apology cocktails, and given her an apology massage, and she had rubbed his scalp to ease him into sleep. She will miss that, she thinks. The closeness and how simple it seemed.

The next time she looks at the phone, Penelope has left a message. Her voice is hushed and soft. It's easy to picture her standing in the dark, outside of a bedroom, outside of wherever Bloom fell asleep, into growing shadows.  
So. Stephen is dead. It's not like it's a surprise.  
Bang Bang thinks of lit fuses and burning highway stations. She goes to the nearest karaoke bar instead.

She doesn't get drunk, but she drinks with more intent than usual. She sings too, a lot. She also breaks the nose of some random jackass who couldn't or wouldn't read her body language. She looks him dead in the eyes (wide and wet with pain) and sings some more. There are worse ways to spend a night.

After that, life goes on in its usual anticlimactic way. She goes to people in need of her skills and offers her help in exchange for money. Finding work is no trouble : she has contacts all over the world and she is a legend. Penelope leaves messages on her voicemail every now and then. She doesn't listen to them, she doesn't delete them.  
People learn not to ask her about the brothers Bloom.

She finds herself a team. It doesn't exactly become her team, but she enjoys working with them. She likes their mix of recklessness and professionalism, and the care they put into being not just efficient, but efficient with panache. Their cons are nothing like Stephen's but they have the poetry of good revenge stories, a sort of ruthless symbolism he would have appreciated _en connaisseur_. They've nicknamed her Kaboom, which suits her just fine.__  
She's done, she thinks, with the life she once had (although that's a very dramatic way of putting it, when all she means is that it's time to destroy a few things). She still doesn't burn the phone.  
What she does, however, is call Penelope.

__ "Bang Bang ?" comes her voice at the other end. "Is that you ?"  
She doesn't answer, which is answer enough.  
"Bang Bang, fuck, I hope it's you. It's so good to hear from you." Penelope laughs at that, at herself. It's still a nice sound.  
"Listen I don't know if you've, uh, okay it doesn't matter. Since you're listening now, I just wanted to tell you, oh, I'm not sure how to tell you that one..."  
Bang Bang waits, patiently. She can always blow up the phone after that. Bloom is talking too, and although she can't make out what he says, he sounds so much like himself that she can't help but grin.  
"We have a child." Penelope finally says and, because she didn't make it sound weird enough, she carries on. "We made a baby."  
Well, fuck. She hopes they didn't name it Stephen.  
"It's a healthy baby girl. She's ten month old now, and her eyes are so bright, I swear she looks at everything."  
Okay, a girl. She hopes they didn't...  
"We didn't name her Stéphanie" specifies Penelope because she knows how people think. "We'd love for you to be her godmother, if you wanted to."  
Bang Bang taps the phone, twice, and hangs up. 

__ She spends an hour in an overclimatized stuffed toys department, trying to decide between a small black and white cow or a fuzzy brown rabbit, and ends up buying both, because it's that or setting the store on fire. She wins a zigzagoon in a claw vending machine and adds it to the pile.  
She makes sure they aren't here when she visits. This was never about coming home.  
The baby's room is pretty and full of light. None of that pink or blue bullshit, but a fresco (of course Penelope painted a fresco) that covers the four walls and details the adventures of a travelling squirrel. Some scenes seem frankly too dark for a child's bedroom but, whatever, it's not like Bang Bang knows anything about infants.  
She leaves the three plushies on the sofa, with a cigarette burn on it as a calling card, and destroys the phone the next day. 

_ _ It's not like she needs it to find them._ _

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not saying that Bang Bang joined the Leverage gang but I'm also not not saying that.
> 
> ("No Ithaca" is an oblique reference to James Joyce's Ulysses, because if Rian Johnson can make them then so can I. And also I'm really bad at finding titles.)


End file.
